


Rotational

by Annflan



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Gen, i wrote most of these at three am lol, oneshots, prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-07-20 09:49:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19990126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annflan/pseuds/Annflan
Summary: A series of one-shots based off of prompts for a contest.Most Recent Prompt: Wool Over Their EyesSasuke has left, and his team must face the aftermath





	1. A Wanderer’s Blood

The life of a traveler is not new to Sasuke. 

He has traveled ever since he became a Shinobi of the Leaf, he traversed as a missing-nin in search of his brother, and he had once marched to destroy Konoha.

But now he treks with no bloodlust, intent on mending the sins of his past that have plagued him since returning to the village. He drifts from town to town and, despite this new purpose, he feels he has the blood of a wanderer.

It runs thick through his veins, just as the blood of his Clan does, and Just as his hatred once had. It keeps him restless when left in the confines of the village, so he does not stay between the walls that slaughtered his family. He leaves, but he will return.

He waits for the day.

He waits for when he can return home, but not to Konoha, it will take time to soothe the hate that aches in his bones. The one that nags at him and can’t allow him to forgive the village that left him orphaned. Home is not leaf-insignias and blood-stained walls. Home, he has learned, is the people.

Home is Naruto’s boisterous laughter and ramen lunches, home is Sakura’s blushes and comforting smiles, home is Kakashi’s laziness and steady wisdom.

He misses his home, and when he reaches the outskirts of the Land of Water, he does not want to wait anymore.

He takes that day himself.


	2. A Letter From the Dead

Death was supposed to be _painless_.

She thought it would be quick, a swift demise whether she was old and wrinkled or young and bloodied. That’s the story her mother comforted her with when she cried in the face of death as a child.

But it hurt, it set alight every nerve in her body when the tendrils of Kakashi's chidori pierced the flesh of her chest. It hurt to look at him for a final time.

The pain did not ease after death. Her skin was icy against the burn of her chest, and the wound itched and throbbed with her every movement. And, gods, the revelation after her killing was nearly painful.

Knowing Obito was alive when she was not.

His body twisted like the trunk of a tree, face pulled into a snarl that was unlike anything she had seen of him before. And when he holds her body and cries, she cries with him, for him, for Kakashi. For their broken, bloodied team.

In the aftermath, she wanders the streets of Konoha.

She avoids seeing Kakashi, for watching him lost and alone makes her wound ache and alight with new pain. But she picks up word of him from the street. From Gai-kun and Kurenai-chan, they’re worried.

She is too.

But she drifts, and she finds herself at the Uchiha manor one drizzly night.

The house is cold and his room colder, a thick layer of dust covers his belongings. She doesn’t doubt that his grandmother hadn’t touched the space in the years between her and Obito’s deaths’.

On his desk sits several sheets of parchment, dusty and sprawled across his desk. She recognizes the familiar scrawl of his writing. It’s thin and messy and several sentences are scribbled out, but it’s eligible. She has to choke back tears as she begins to read.

 _Dear Rin,_ it starts, _I’ve been meaning to tell you this awhile--_

It continues, and she recognizes it as a love letter. But Obito has never been a master of words, his metaphors are awkward and his sentences stilted. He isn’t much of a romantic, but his words are full of a passion that is wholly Obito’s and it’s genuine and sweet and that wound in her chest aches just a little bit more.

The letter is cut abruptly off by splotches of ink spilt across the parchment, it bleeds heavily onto the paper below.

And that’s when she notices.

A loose team photo is laid under the letter. The ink has claimed the portrait below in its merciless conquest, it streaks across Obito’s old genin photo until he is hardly recognizable beneath the bottomless black.

The gape just above her breast flares in pain, and it is all she can do to scrabble away.

Rin leaves the manor that night, and she does not return.


	3. The Moon is Beautiful Tonight

The sky bleeds a plethora of colors when dusk settles, it paints the horizon in a gradient of deep blues, shades in which he knows not the names. But the colors are familiar in the way that the moon is familiar, or the stars, or the rain.

The blue is there, and it will remain a steady backdrop amongst the stars. Stars that stare prettily down at him now, as the clusters of light move in tandem with the turn of the planet.

If he was a poet, he’d think them spirits. Watching the people they had left long ago carefully, they are a sanction, a comfort. They have watched his growth, his destruction, they’ve followed his path through redemption. He is not thankful, for there is no gratitude to give to the entities that settle above him. 

But he is no writer, so he does not voice these musings aloud, nor does he permanently ink scrolls with his thoughts. He sits quietly on the creaky front steps of a nameless inn, its awning a canopy above him. The soft summer air is warm within his lungs and cicadas hum monotonously within the trees. His eyelids begin to droop with the lull of a summer night.

He shifts his tired eyes to the moon, just on the cusp of fullness, its light pulses with an intimate gleam that he has molded into his memory. It soothes him with its familiarity. Recollections of gazing at its center as the red glow of lanterns shine softly around him, his family, his friends.

His mind lazily drifts to his wife, and he knows with a certainty that burns through his blood that they stare at the same sky now. The same scattered stars, the same royal blues. Sasuke closes his eyes as a light wind brushes past his face.

“The moon is beautiful, isn’t it, Sakura?”


	4. Porcelain Mask

After Rin’s death, Kakashi isolates himself. 

He shuffles around tiredly within Konoha’s walls, working himself to the bone with every mission he can gnab.

He finds family with porcelain masks and blank stares. Blood-stained gloves and screeching tendrils of electricity are his constants. A nag that fuels him to continue his plight. Wounded or no, it’s his own duty to support his village. And he continues with strife. 

He returns from empty eyes to emptier walls, there is nothing there for him, and so he continues his grueling missions, bloodied and battered and exhausted. 

His only family is his work, his missions, the countless assassinations and murders. 

And the empty stare of a porcelain mask.


	5. Chapter 5

After he leaves, it’s like the curtain was lifted from their eyes

The dark blanket of friendship that clouded their judgment. Their naivete, their hope, It led them down a path of blindness-- of unwavering adoration. 

It washes away like mud on a rainy day, soaks through the crevices of their deepest thoughts, and they bury it there, in the aftermath. 

She cries fresh tears and he spits out curses and threats and they both yell and make promises they’re too powerless to keep. 

And Sasuke is gone, blown away like a leaf in the brittle morning wind. 

In their darkest days, after they pull that wool off their eyes and come back with a kunai embedded in their backs, they face the music.

And they don’t think he will ever return.

**Author's Note:**

> This will be a series of five prompts for a contest in which you have to write one story every three days for 5/15 prompts. The word limit for each is 500 words.


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